Family Matters
by Sashet
Summary: The Doctor's 'daughter' makes him think...and it's not all good! Introspective one shot for 10. Spoilers for 'The Doctor's Daughter'. Thanks to Dr D for the beta


I have… I HAD a daughter but now…now she is gone and I never really knew her

Family Matters

I have… I HAD a daughter but now…now she is gone and I never had a chance to get to know her. It wasn't until she lay dying in my arms that I realised what a fool I had been to try and dismiss her from my life. How selfish and stupid and insular ….all the things I had so hated about the Time Lords I was now guilty of …and she, my daughter paid the price for those actions.

It is a curse that follows me through all of time and space that those I love, those I need to make me complete, whether or not I choose to accept that fact, all end up dead, or lost to me forever, separated by an aching void that even I am not yet ready to cross.

I never wanted this life, this lonely life as the last of the Time Lords but it is because of me that I live it and so, somehow, it seems right. A sort of poetic justice, a never ending punishment befitting of the crime I committed. I walk alone amongst the stars trying to save everybody and everything I can because I can't... I couldn't... save those who meant the most to me, my family…all of them…not just those tied to me by blood but those tied to me by tradition, by a shared history that I cannot escape.

I tried to use the Time Lords as an excuse, a reason why she couldn't be my daughter, why she could never be more than a manufactured soldier. Yes, she had two hearts but that didn't make her the same as me that was just a genetic anomaly, a fluke, a quirk of the machine, it didn't make her like me.

What made her like me was her damned insightful mind, her irrefutable logic, her ability to cut to the centre of an argument. Everything I threw at her she parried with ease – it was like so many lifetimes ago when I would spar with words with The Master and although I always won sometimes it wasn't convincingly – she countered every argument and stirred up a clutch of memories that were always with me but were usually buried where they couldn't prick my conscience and make me question my own actions.

She made me admit to what I had done in the Time War, what I had really done. She made me admit that I had been a soldier, we all had… there had been no other choice, and that I had fought and I had killed. The blood of the two mightiest races in the known universe was a stain on my soul that nothing could ever remove. She asked me how what I had done was different to what she would do and for once I, The Doctor, the man who has an answer for everything, had no answer to give. That was what made me like her and thus her like me. We were soldiers and it was only the way we would fight our battles that would be different.

My daughter….daughter…the word seemed alien to me although it shouldn't have been. I'd been a father before, so many, many, years ago. I was a different man then, and not just physically. It was a time before the Time War when life was….simpler…and I wasn't burdened with the guilt of survival and still believed in love.

I'd had a family who I loved and who loved me back. They…I …thought we would be together forever but it was not to be. They were lost to me, lost to the Universe when I stepped in to stop the Time War. I hope they didn't suffer. I hope they never knew that it was me who killed them. I have enough grief and enough hurt to last me until I too can finally die. As I watched my planet burn, the sky imploding in a fiery ball from which there could be no escape, I told myself that I didn't deserve to love again. It was my self imposed penance for being the bringer of death to friend and enemy alike, and until I met Rose I had relished it. But she had been different; she had broken down those walls, shown me that maybe forever was too long to be alone.

Now my daughter opened up those memories and every time I looked at her I saw my family, I saw Rose and I saw what I could never have again. I didn't want to have to go through anything like the pain in my hearts when I lost them ever again and I was afraid that if I let Jenny into my life then that would be what happened. But she WAS my daughter and maybe Rose was right, maybe I had been alone too long, maybe it was time to have somebody to love. Maybe..just maybe…

Then with blinding speed and unfathomable cruelty I no longer have that choice, I no longer have to choose whether to accept her as my daughter, whether to love her as my daughter because she is dying. Dying in my arms, dying for me, dying instead of me and all because I told her that there is another way, that killing isn't always the answer. The pain is there, the anger and the frustration are there bubbling inside me and not just for Jenny but for all those I have loved and lost and somebody has to pay. I have had enough and, despite what I had told her, right now I think that killing is the only thing that will make me feel better.

But in the end I can't do it, I can't kill. I am still not the killer I once was now I am the bringer of death, it follows me throughout time and space and I no longer have the strength to let it take another that I care for. So I won't care and I won't love – I will just survive.


End file.
